Embodied Action as a 'Helping Hand' in Social Interaction

Embodied Action as a ‘Helping Hand’ in Social Interaction Jessica Lindblom (jessica.lindblom@his.se) School of Humanities and Informatics, University of Skovde, P.O. 408, 541 28 Skovde, SWEDEN That is, cognitive functions are manifested in artifacts, and dynamic and social processes can be directly observed and studied. However, the main focus in DC is on the flow and transformation of information through different media at a more general level, rather than the particular role of the body in these processes. This means, despite the emphasis on interactions between agents and their material as well as social surroundings, the DC approach offers not much on the embodied nature of human cognition, as usually conceived, and currently it is peculiarly ‘disembodied’. This paper aims to complement the general understanding on the embodied nature of social interaction and cognition, and therefore presents part of an emerging framework, which emphasizes the roles of dynamically and socially embodied actions in the social realm. The rest of the paper is structured as follows. The next section presents research from different disciplines that stress the crucial role of embodiment in social interaction. Next, based on these issues, a theoretical framework is outlined, which portrays five fundamental functions of embodied actions in social interaction. Then an instrumental case study in an everyday social situation is presented, which illustrates parts of the developing framework. The paper ends with a summary and discussion. Abstract Although embodiment has become an important concept in many areas of cognitive science during the past two decades, most research has focused on individual agents and their interactions with the environment. This paper focuses on the social dimension of embodiment, and offers a conceptual framework that addresses embodied actions in the social realm. The framework identifies some fundamental functions of embodiment in social interaction, which are also illustrated by a case study in an everyday social setting. Generally speaking, embodied actions provide a helping hand in social interaction, both in a literal and practical sense. Keywords: embodiment; social interaction; joint action; dynamically embodied actions Introduction The ability to engage in social interaction is one of the building blocks of human culture, and is the foundation for the complexity of social life and social cognition. Despite these facts, the main focus in most theories of embodied cognition has until now been on the relation between the individual body and its cognitive processes, in interaction with the physical environment (cf., e.g., Chrisley & Ziemke, 2003; Clark, 1999; Nunez, 1999; Riegler, 2002; Wilson, 2002; Ziemke, 2003). However, Johnson and Rohrer (in press), for instance, point out that “embodied cognition is often social and carried out cooperatively by more than one individual”. Therefore, there is a need to move beyond the current emphasis on the interactions between the individual and the physical environment, to interactions between agents and their social environment. Others have recognized this as well, and argued that theoretical knowledge of embodiment needs to be extended beyond current notions and/or levels of ‘individual’ embodiment (cf., e.g., Anderson, in press; Lindblom & Ziemke, 2003; 2005, in press; Sinha & Jensen, Many theories of social and cultural cognition tend to overlook the role of the body in social interaction by treating embodied social interactions such as body posture, gaze and gesture as nothing but the visible outcomes of mental intentions (cf. Tomasello, 1999; Tomasello et al., 2005; Frith & Wolpert, 2004). On the other hand, the distributed cognition approach proposed by Hutchins (1995), for instance, treats these social interactions and the external materials involved, as directly observable cognitive events in the situated interaction (Johnson, 2001). With this crucial change in perspective, much of cognition that earlier was hidden ‘inside’ the skull has now become apparent. On the Embodied Nature of Social Interaction Recent work in cognitive science and related disciplines indicates that the body plays several important roles in social interaction. In order to deepen our understanding of social embodiment, an integrated approach is necessary, which analyzes and identifies the fundamental functions of embodiment in social interaction and cognition. But so far there is no common theoretical framework considering such a crossdisciplinary approach. In this paper, I will briefly address different perspectives, ranging from phenomenology, neuroscience, social psychology, and gesture to linguistics. These perspectives flow not only vertically through time but also horizontally across disciplines. There is, of course, much more research, that can and should be integrated conceptually, but due to space limitations, the aim here is limited to showing how crucial the body and its sensorimotor processes are in social interaction and cognition. Phenomenology Already in the 1940s, the French philosopher Merleau- Ponty argued that intercorporeality constitutes the basis of intersubjectivity and social interaction (cf. Lindblom &